Each day, I face a new wave of crap that people bring to my home for me to manage. We now have baby version 3.0 on the way, with an early March release date, and there's a bit of "getting ready" that needs to happen.

For a few years we were good with the stuff management, 2003-2007 have been, um....less good. But we're ending 2007 with clear direction and a Plan Of Action that seems to be working, if not as fast as I'd like.

Like you, we have scores of those Rubbermaid totes, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. For reasons that my "Y" chomosone prevents me from understanding fully, my wife has what amounts to basically continuous, daily chore that involves washing, sorting, folding, storing and unstoring articles of clothing that are forever arriving as gifts and hand-me-overs from others as well as departing for thrift shops and to the homes of other kids. As far as I can tell, at any given moment, 80% of the clothing in our home is either recently arrived, is about to depart or was left here by someone, we just don't know who. Add to this a need to manage a seemingly endless progression of kids clothes that are too small, too big, the wrong season or the wrong style. The launder-management, which differs in complexity from the launch of a telecommunications sattelite only in that the clothing does not end up in space, is the main use of most of our Rubbermaid totes and is my wife's contribution to the sotrage dillema we face.

Not wanting to be an unequal partner in the arrangement, I contribute to the storage dillema in my own way. First of all, there's always 3 to 5 computers in the basement in some state of dissassembly and re-assembly as I have this almost obsessive tendancy to rescue, rebuild, and give away computers. In any given month, I'll get 8 or 9 systems, from which I can usually build 4 or 5 fairly nice systems which I then give away. Well you can imagine what this means I have a lot of drawers full of hard drives, NIC cards, memory sticks, and the like. Now add to this the fact that I've never met a tool I didn't like, but my basement shop is only 14'x18'. And then add to this that I just KNOW that that coil of 650' of quad-sheild RG59 that I found will be handy one day, if I ever need it. Oh, and that milk crate full of all those NEMA L-15 Twist Lock connectors, that cold be useful for something. And that big trash bag of packing peanuts. I mean, it's a shame to throw them out right? They won't go bad, after all. Oh, and look at this folding table - it's perfectly good, they were throwing it in the trash!

Now, put this together, and you have a Storage Dillemma of Epic Proportions.

I know that the answer is a mass reduction of stuff, and at this moment, I think that's our single biggest challenge - simply getting the stuff OUT to the people and places that will take it. I did recently give away my old pickup truck, just because it was another thing to be managed, and I know that this weekend, I'm going to be hauling just huge quantities of old technology out of the house, for good. I know that 10GB hard drives were a big deal once, now they are space-wasters, and it's time to let go. I'm also going to apply the "I haven't touched this in a year" rule to a bunch of stuff, no matter how "useful" it might be. Or local Freecycle group is going to have a good week as I clear out the basement.